I’ve had lots of great conversations about data feeds in the last 24 hours. Advertisers (merchants) and publishers (affiliates) recognize the value of data feeds, but it seems they’re just getting going. If merchants are submitting data feeds to CJ, Linkshare, ShareASale, or Google Affiliate Network, the feeds are very basic. If affiliates are using data feeds, they’re more advanced than most.

So there’s some great potential, but data feeds just seem to be an alternative marketing tool in the affiliate space. In fact, I actually talked with a representative from a well known merchant last night who is responsible for data feeds/shopping engines as well as affiliates and the person’s title was ‘alternative’ online marketing… Got a kick out of that!

My panel is this morning. Will let you know how it goes and recap the main discussion points.

If you’re not at the conference, check out the #asw10 on twitter. So far, so good. I was here 2 years back and wasn’t that impressed. This conference seems to be much more professional, organized.

Love that the first two sessions I’ve attended have already mentioned data feeds:
Merchant Challenges in the Affiliate Space & Affiliate Program Case Studies: Strategies and Practices (see agenda)

The importance of data feeds in the affiliate industry has definitely grown over the last couple. I know that super affiliates thrive off of high quality data feeds, but it seems that the affiliate masses now understand the value of category/product/sku information in data feeds. Seems like the affiliate networks need to put together some case studies about the use of data feeds.

I’ll be speaking at Affiliate Summit West next week in Vegas. Arriving Sunday afternoon and leaving Tuesday evening. On a panel Monday @ 11:30am Monday. Will be talking about data feeds with Scott Jangro (MechMedia), Larry Adams (Google Affiliate Network), and Shergul Arshad (StyleFeeder). We’ll discuss “the current state of datafeeds and industry progress, best practices, and moving toward standards.” Should be a solid interactive session.

My schedule is a little tight, but if any merchants want to get together during the conference to discuss data feeds or SingleFeed, let me know.
Email: brian @ comparisonengines dot com.

Thanks!
Look forward to seeing everyone!
-brian

This morning, Yahoo! Product Submit merchants were notified that as of March 11, 2010, Yahoo! Shopping is partnering with PriceGrabber. At that time, merchants will no longer be able to submit to Yahoo! Product Submit to list products on Yahoo! Shopping, but must submit through PriceGrabber. If merchants don’t have an account with PriceGrabber and want to make sure their listings remain live on Yahoo! Shopping after March 11, they should sign up with PriceGrabber ASAP.

View the email notification.

Yahoo! has released this help page that will answer most questions.

This is a bittersweet end to Yahoo! Shopping, considering the effort they made to revamp the site in 2007-2008, but not surprising given the Bing/Yahoo! search deal. I assumed that Bing Cashback would replace Yahoo! Product Submit, so I got that one wrong. Congrats to Sean and the PriceGrabber team for grabbing this deal in a crowded market (Shopping.com, Shopzilla, and NexTag all have partner programs).

PriceGrabber can and should play up this partnership. PriceGrabber has hundreds of partners, and I believe this would be the third partnership involving another well know or big shopping engine brand: AOL Search/Shopping and MySimon being the others (yes, there are some smaller deals, but I think these are the ones that count). Yahoo! Shopping consistently is one of the most trafficked shopping engines, but merchants should know that while consumers might flock to Yahoo! Shopping (because of incredible exposure throughout Yahoo! Search and smaller vertical sites like Yahoo! Tech), SingleFeed’s stats (covering hundreds of merchants) show that merchants don’t get the traffic and sales that you might expect from such a big name with such high traffic numbers. I have a feeling this is because of Yahoo! Shopping’s focus on brand name advertising for the big guys through graphical ads (hat tip to Colin) as well as the many Yahoo! Search Marketing ads that take the focus away from merchant product listings. So this is a nice win, but if you’re a PriceGrabber merchant, don’t expect your traffic and sales to double overnight because of this deal.

In this morning’s industry note, Piper Jaffray feels confident with its prediction of 5% year over year growth for eCommerce sales during the 2009 holiday shopping season based on easy y/y comparisons, the snow storm, comScore’s 4% Holiday Shopping 2009 growth numbers, and Coremetrics’ 6% Holiday Shopping 2009 growth numbers.

Coremetrics also reported extremely strong numbers for late last week:

-Online retail sales from Mon., Dec. 14 – Sun., Dec. 20, 2009 were up 14.6 percent compared to Mon., Dec. 15 – Sun., Dec. 21, 2008 (year-over-year).
-Online retail sales for Fri., Dec. 18, 2009 and Sat., Dec. 19, 2009 were up 24 percent compared to Fri., Dec. 19 and Sat., Dec. 20, 2008.
-Online retail sales for Sun., Dec. 20, 2009 were up 20 percent from Sun., Dec. 21, 2008.

I think some of this could be because of the snow storm that blanketed the East coast. Usually the last week tapers off a bit more due to shipping deadlines.

Back to PJ’s report, Gene Munster’s group is now predicting “8% retail eCommerce sales growth in 2010 as the economy improves and retail share gains reaccelerate.”

If you need a ticket to TechCrunch’s Avatar screening, ping me, and I might be able to get you in. SingleFeed is a ‘popcorn and soda’ sponsor. We’re doing this to get the word out about our Engineering Lead job opening.

So if you’re in San Francisco and need an excuse to leave work early tomorrow (screening is @ 4pm, must be at theater early), email brian at singlefeed.com or brian at comparisonengines.com.

Look forward to seeing everyone there!

Over the last 4 months, your Froogle data feed, I mean Google Base data feed, I mean Google Product Search data feed…ummm…I really mean Google Merchant Center data feed got a lot more important as Google is doing more and more with that data feed.

Background: Google Merchant Center recently replaced Google Base, the place where merchants submit and manage their product data feeds. There is some new functionality in the Google Merchant Center compared to Google Base, but the core function of the Google Merchant Center feed is still to manage products listings on Google Product Search, Google’s shopping search engine. Merchants know Google Product Search as a significant source of free traffic, partly because of the powerful product OneBox results.

For years, the Google Base data feed had been used solely for populating Google Product Search, but recently, the power of that structured data feed has come to light. Google now uses the Google Merchant Center data feed for the Google Affiliate Network (GAN), Product Listing Ads – Beta (which is run through the GAN), Extension Ads (which is an AdWords product), and the newly launched Commerce Search (which is an Enterprise product).

A picture is worth a thousand words, so here goes.

Google Product Listing Ads – Beta:

Google Product Listing Ads – Beta are run through the Google Affiliate Network (GAN), which can leverage product information from Google Merchant Center data feed. A merchant sets a commission amount per sale and Google, acting as a publisher, can display these ads where it sees fit (the merchant doesn’t have control). If a sale happens, Google gets paid a commission.

The screenshot above represents one example of Product Listings. In this case, there are a number of merchants represented in each Ad. You’ll also notice the OneBox 5 pack listings right under the Sponsored Listings.

Here’s an example of Product Listings with just one merchant listed:

Product Extensions:

Product Extensions is a Google AdWords product which was just opened up to all Google Merchant Center accounts. Merchant’s have control over where (for which keyword searches) Extensions are displayed. As Extensions is an AdWords product, normal AdWords CPC charges apply. You’ll see a ton of these Extensions marked by a little + underneath AdWords listings for most any product searches on Google.

Google Affiliate Network (GAN):
GAN came out of Google’s Performics acquisition in 2008. GAN can tap into a merchant’s Google Merchant Center data feed. In allowing this, a merchant is providing publishers access to a wealth of product information which allows publishers to provide a much deeper and richer experience than just banners or buttons.

Google Commerce Search:
This is a specialized site search for merchants that launched a couple weeks back. Google Commerce Search leverages the Google Merchant Center data feed. Watch the Google Commerce Search video intro or download the data sheet. Benefits of on-site search should be pretty obvious. An ecommerce focused site search is a smart move as retail is much different than any other verticals as consumers are looking for attributes like promos, sales, and categories. A regular site search product might be able to highlight some of these attributes, but using the Google Merchant Center data feed enables Google Commerce Search to provide a much more specialized (deeper and richer) on site search experience.

As with any Google product, expect OneBox listings, Product (Listing) Ads, Product Extensions, Google Affiliate Network, and Google Commerce Search to morph in the coming year, but the thing that will not change is the importance of the Google Merchant Center data feed. If you’re not submitting a high quality data feed, now is the time!

Results from Cyber Monday 2009:
comScore – December 2, 2009 – Cyber Monday Ecommerce Sales up 5% year over year.

NRF – December 1, 2009 – Shop.org’s CyberMonday.com, which features holiday promotions and special savings from more than 700 retailers, had 15.8 million visits yesterday, an increase of eight percent from Cyber Monday 2008.

PayPal – December 1, 2009 – PayPal saw approximately 20 percent more payment volume on Cyber Monday 2009 than Cyber Monday 2008

Mercent – December 1, 2009 – Cyber Monday Online Retail Sales Grow 33% over 2008, In-line with Black Friday Results

Channel Intelligence – December 2, 2009 – Comparing Cyber Monday 2009 to 2008, CI retail customers on average enjoyed an 83 percent increase in sales.

Coremetrics – 1. Sales were up 13.7 percent compared to Cyber Monday 2008. 2. The average dollar amount consumers spent per online order rose 38.2 percent from Cyber Monday 2008 ($180.03 versus $130.24), led by apparel retailers.

I think that a couple more fairly well known brick and mortar retailers will go bankrupt in early 2010. Expect to see some of them come back as online only stores. Great article on OregonLive.com talking about the online resurrection of Circuit City, Linens ‘n Things, Smith & Hawken, etc.

SingleFeed is growing and growing. We’ll be profitable next year. We need a rockstar or 2 to join our engineering team. This is a perfect opportunity for an engineer at one of the shopping engines who is ready to get back to start up life.

You’re a kick-ass, no bull, brilliant engineer and engineering manager who will wow our customers and the rest of the team by building a great product.

• You will work long hours coding and put your heart and soul into this company and be rewarded for it.
• You are metrics driven.
• You know documenting and testing needs to get done properly.
• You believe in Agile development.
• You are proactive, aggressive, bold, diligent, and a rock star coder.
• You inspire, lead, and coach while still rolling up your sleeves to code.

You know, love, and live Ruby, Rails, mySQL, but have a traditional foundation which enables you to learn new languages. You are not scared of picking up new (or old) programming languages because while you understand the benefits of Ruby, you recognize the business case for maintaining a system that is already working. A lot of our code is currently in Perl.

You have xperience building systems that handle lots of data and perform fast and reliably. Experience working with Amazon, eBay, ecommerce platforms, analytics/reporting systems would be very good.

You know Linux and when necessary can assist in the administration, maintenance, and upgrading of our systems. You understand network topography and could maintain, grow, and optimize our database clusters, our web Apache web servers, our DNS, our connectivity, and more.

This is a perfect opportunity for someone who wants to build a successful start up with a small team.

Key Competencies:
• Ruby on Rails
• mySQL
• Perl
• Linux administration
• Apache web server configuration/installation
• Network administration, including but not limited to:
1. DNS
2. mySQL Cluster administration
3. ssh tunnels, network connectivity
• Amazon EC2 AMI

More:
• Experience managing small Agile teams
• Loves working on a team
• Likes to get things done – we value prototypes and code over posturing and talk
• Entrepreneurial – everybody has ownership and a say